Last night I went out with Katina and her bridal party to dinner at Friday’s.  It was interesting because aside from work related things, I don’t really hang out with anyone anymore.  (Well, and things with Kellie and Thomas.)  It was fun times, and it was nice to get out of the house and be with other people.  It wasn’t nice enough to keep me out though, and I ended up going home and having my first meeting with my editor for Abandon.

It actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  You see, when you hand over your work to be edited, and it’s a good editor, your pages come back looking like this:

What’s black and white and red all over? Ashley’s copy of my book.

The sea of red is quite concerning. I mean, I knew my book had problems…. but holy hell.  The good news is, my editor believes in me enough to want to restructure the deal that I made with her for the second and third books to get a cut of the profit, and the majority of things were stylistic issues that can be easily resolved.  We’re definitely on target to re-release Abandon on December 24th like I originally anticipated.  In fact, I might have it done a little early with the pace we’re going.

What’s awesome is that this is getting back me into my book.  After I released Abandon I wanted to write Savior (the sequel) for National Novel Writing Month – but I totally failed on that.  I mean, I only ended up 7K words or something like that.  But it’s actually awesome, because with some of the direction that Abandon is going in with these edits, I’m finding areas that I can change in the structure with Savior, and add some character development things as well.  What’s more, I’m kind of really excited about it.

So, again, my biggest mistake with Abandon was not hiring an editor prior to release – but the most awesome thing about self publishing is that I can do that after.  :)